Glenn Mori, crafting with words, notes and thoughts
Fiction, jazz, and other stuff!
Writing a satisfying ending is not easy. Sometimes you just feel it, put it down on paper, and then ‘ahh’, yes, that’s right. More often, for me, it turns out to be more difficult to find the ending than it was to create the germ of idea of what to write about.
Continue reading “The Final Note: Why Writing the End of a Story is Harder Than You Think”
How do you take a scene or character and turn it into a short story?
A dozen years ago I decided to improve my prose. I started writing shorter pieces because that would allow me to stop and edit and polish and then quickly start again on something new. But in the process, I discovered that it’s not easy for me—a novel reader, primarily—to find the meaning or point of a short story. I have pieces that seem to have legs but they don’t always lead somewhere satisfying.
I’ve had the same personal email address for twenty years. It’s a great address that I grabbed when our service provider first started its own email service.
Continue reading “The Long Goodbye: Using ChatGPT to Transition from a Two-Decade-Old Email Address”
My novella, “Water for TsaTsa” is now published and available, in the Rise Novella Anthology!
I’ve always done some personal writing. Blog entries are one type—early ones that were collecting poker learnings and hand analysis, now fiction writing learnings and analysis—and all the way back to when I kept a personal journal as a college student.
I’m writing backwards.
I’ve tried something similar before, starting from an event, treating it as the effect and then looking for potential causes. And following that with the cause for that cause, and a cause for that cause, and so on.
I have difficulty finding books to read using our library’s online system. If you know the author or the title it works great, but when you are searching for good novels across various genres written by authors that you have not previously read and only in ebook form and available right now, it’s not as helpful.
I’m listening to Mahler on Spotify. Randomly selected his 5th Symphony because it came up first.
I’m using it as background music while I’m working, but I started to wonder why I’ve never been a Mahler fan. I stop to pay more attention. It’s the middle of a movement and I probably should have started my attentiveness at the beginning, but I don’t hear classic melodies and development, not that I expected Beethoven, given Mahler’s late Romantic time frame. I hear motifs and fragments being varied and built on, like stream of consciousness writing or a particular style of jazz improvisation where the improvisor is focused on fragments and development. It’s coherent, with a string of logic, but I can’t make sense overall of it. As if someone is talking on and on in English but on a topic I have no experience with.
Before I went to sleep last night I wrote a few hundred words in a scene where my main character’s cheek is grazed sparring in karate class. The near miss triggers her and she retaliates, out of control, not pulling and controlling her kick and she hurts her classmate. I also started sketching the next scene where her Sensei has to talk with her after class.
My plan for my novel includes one primary inciting incident, followed by internal and external struggles, and ending with an opportunity for the protagonist to finish what was interrupted the first time.